Please help me with my garden (pic - embarrassing one!)

[GardenNightmare]

I have no idea about gardening. Moved in to a new place a while back and have no idea where to start. Weather is starting to get nice and the garden is unusable! The grass is dead in areas, has plastic mesh underneath it which is supposed to be awful for the environment. Hundreds of sycamore seedlings everywhere. How would you even start to fix this?

I would pave the area near the house. Build 2 or 3 raised planter flower beds, 2 on 1 side of garden 1 on other kind of staggered protruding into grassed area. Get plenty of height into the beds, may end architectural planting. Put a small tree in at the end, maybe an acer? Add pots with grasses, and a herb planter. Have fun, maybe watch some episodes of Garden Rescue on iPlayer for ideas?

I've never painted fences as it seems like quite a job and you have to be very careful of paint leaking through to the other side. Do you know which fences are yours? I believe you can slide out the panels on concrete posts, paint them and pop them back in (mine aren't this type so I've covered them with climbing plants instead!). Do check whether you own them or not first! Might be too much aggro if you have a difficult neighbour and a baby on the way.

I've seen lots of photos of grey fences lately (light or dark grey) which look quite sophisticated and show greenery off well. Pink/blue/purple fences plus that nasty reddish brown colour look pretty bad imo

I think I'd look into the tall raised bed idea mentioned above, make that your main extravagance. Plant them up with some small ornamental trees/acers, box shapes, climbers (you can get evergreen ones for winter interest) and a bit of summer bedding to add interest to the fence if painting is a no-go.

I always rave about Cuprinol seagrass as my fave shed colour

It's really relaxing to look at and goes well with green lawns/planting and grey! Wilko do a copy in their range.
Or like pp said get one of the plastic Keter storage sheds.

Wilko is great for gardening stuff including tools on a budget. Aldi do good weekly/monthly gardening events, some of it is on their website with delivery. Morrisons have been pretty good for budget plants including more expensive things (acers, shrubs, box shapes etc).

Yes garden, sycamore seedlings won't survive all their leaves being mown off.
I'd be wondering why the previous owners decided to put a grid down in the first place. It may be as simple as that at one point it was used to park cars or as hardstanding for a caravan and then next owners tried to grass it without a suitable depth of soil. On the other hand, do you thing it is possible it gets waterlogged in wet weather. If so, this might affect what you do.

I think first thing is to get fences painted!!pp correct on checking which are the yours. If your extremely careful painting.. Depending which way slats go... You can do it without dripping. Do it in lighter colour and get space unified paint bricks too.

We have painted about 20 meters of fence (ours) it wasn't any trouble at all! Boring after no 10 yes. But the difference... Then grass, create small border dig in earth then , clematis up fence (strip chicken wire up) some cosmos in.. Other annuals.. Will be a joy but until that fence is sorted out in my view in such small space nothing will look that great.